By the way, since someone has already asked (and I generally get requests for more info when I write about this stuff here) people are welcome to contact me if they want to know more about techniques I’ve used for emotional healing.
I’m working on some written material to share my learnings with others who may benefit from it, so if you get in touch I can share it when it’s ready.
My own story has some similarities to yours -- I joined an elite startup accelerator straight out of university, thought I had a bunch of pretty damned good business ideas to work on (and looking back, I did -- I had a pretty good understanding of business strategy, engineering, product design, etc) -- but then ended up bouncing between jobs and quickly-aborted startup attempts, before crashing pretty hard around age 26-27. Meanwhile plenty of my peers steadily moved forwards while a few others shot off into the stratosphere.
I actually knew Leo Widrich, author of the article, back in university! Two guys had set up the "Internet Entreprneur Society" at our university in the British midlands, I was helping them run it as they were about to graduate. Leo was an Austrian business student with lots of passion and just starting to learn about tech startups. He ended up working with one of the two guys I mentioned (Joel Gascgoine) on some tweet scheduling app which is now apparently worth about $80m :) Small world!
As for myself, after several setbacks in my late 20s, I realised I had a whole bunch of psychological/emotional issues stemming from an unstable childhood. What's surprising is that with time and effort all these problems were, in fact, fixable... and through lots of reading and self-work I've managed to fix 80-90% of these issues. Like you, my desire to build a startup business empire has diminished greatly, and, nowadays, after learning all the things I've learned, I've rethought my career plans, and figured out a new direction to go down which ties together the various things I'm interested in, and which I'm very confident I can succeed at. (I'd rather not go into details in a public forum, but's it essentially a path that combines intellectual and technological projects).
(For those in a similar situation, the best books I read were: "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents", "Running on Empty: Overcoming your Childhood Emotional Neglect", "Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving" and "Psychology of Self-esteem". I also recommend the post "What is a central purpose in life?" (plus comments) [1] for a discussion of how to integrate one's career values).
I’m working on some written material to share my learnings with others who may benefit from it, so if you get in touch I can share it when it’s ready.
Email address in profile.